Half a minute later the cop passed between their station and mine. He didn’t check them and that could mean they were local and would therefore have nothing to do with Kobra. It was a clue to their identity but not reliable and I began worrying.

  Milan. Geneva. Phnom Penh, Gut-think: discount.

  The darkness was composed partially of light. The actual sources of the light - the street-lamps - were blinding to the eye and left the shadows almost black in places where doorways were deep and the hoardings threw an angular pattern. I had sufficient cover to use but couldn’t reach it without showing my direction.

  A Yellow Cab passed between the buildings, sending a wash of light along the walls. The two men turned their backs until it had gone. This was quite a professional move but not all that sophisticated: it was a street-crime skill and it didn’t identify them as trained operators.

  They were facing forward from the doorway again and watching me. I didn’t think there was much chance of identifying them until they came close and if they came close it could be too late because if they were operationally trained they’d know how to kill.

  Harrison. Hunter. Chepstow.

  Gut-think: ignore.

  They moved again, one going north and one south along me opposite pavement. In ten seconds they were out of sight because I was a few yards into the mouth of the alley and was therefore blinkered beyond a thirty-degree vector, I listened for them, Nothing.

  Nothing close.

  The rattle of a cab.

  A Ship on the Hudson, Silence again.

  Then their footsteps.

  I walked halfway down the alley and turned round.

  From this position I could assess their approach and if I thought they were professionals I could turn again and get out of the alley at the other end.

  They became visible, their silhouettes moving against the back-lighting of the street behind them. They came quickly but were not running. There was a certain discipline in the way they walked. I couldn’t see any sign of a weapon and certainly neither of them was holding a gun: their silhouettes were sharp and I could see their hands swinging freely as they walked.

  They looked confident and I now assumed they were professionals. Their quick footsteps were taking on a strange echo and it alerted me: they were closer than they looked. I turned and began my run but stopped dead when I saw the two other men coming the other way.

  Chapter Eleven: ZADE

  The sky throbbed.

  I lifted the bottle. It took all my strength The bottle was empty.

  Light flared on the glass, bunding me.. It came from the lamp.

  The tall lamps burned in the sky, searing my eyes.

  The man beside me stank.

  My feet were in the gutter, one sock half off, ‘Shit, man, git your ass outa here.’

  ‘Shuddup,’ I said, ‘or I’ll smash you.’

  He stank of alcohol and vomit.

  I lifted the bottle again, moaning.

  ‘Shit, man,’ he said.

  He thought there was wine in the bottle, thought it was his.

  ‘I’ll smash you to a pulp,’ I said, ‘if you don’t shuddup,’

  He was dangerous.

  He could get me killed.

  My head throbbed and the sky throbbed.

  But there wasn’t any blood. Not enough for them to see.

  Tyres squealed faintly at the intersection.

  I saw one of them coming again, and lifted the bottle.

  Consciousness began gaining now, faster, because of the danger.

  He came past, walking steadily. I watched his feet.

  His feet were at eye-level.

  If he looked down, that would be it, Finis.

  His heel into my face: finis.

  He stopped.

  I looked up at him obliquely, squinting, my eyes almost shut against the blinding light, the bottle blazing. I didn’t recognize him: he was one of the four who had been in the alley. One of the three still alive.

  And he wouldn’t recognize me either, I knew that. We’d all been moving very fast and it had been half dark. But he’d see, if he looked down, that my clothes weren’t filthy and torn. He’d see other signs that I hadn’t been lying here for months, night after night for months, dying the way I wanted.

  But there was nothing more that I could do except wait. My present position was as vulnerable as it had been before in the alley but that was academic. Fire, frying pan, so forth.

  The organism had looked after itself without my having to do any more thinking. I’d done me necessary amount of thinking first and then given the instructions to the organism and it had taken over. With two of them coming at me from each end of the alley there’d been no point in waiting till they closed on me at their own pace. The only chance lay in immediate and very aggressive action and I had made my run flat out, choosing this end of the alley because the street at the other end had exposure zones that I wanted to leave alone.

  I didn’t know if the two men behind me had started running: it didn’t make any difference because I was going so hard that they wouldn’t gain on me. The strength of the opposition had now been halved and there were only two people to deal with. They’d both stopped and were waiting and I think one of them was pulling a gun as I reached them.

  The techniques of unarmed combat taught at Norfolk are based partly on karate. I have only used them twice to save my life, once in Warsaw and once in Hong Kong. In those instances there was only one adversary. Here there were two. There is nothing new about the primordial components of speed and surprise: they are essential to any attack, by whatever technique. Two further psychological components come into play when life is actually threatened: the instinct to survive, and the ability to relax and allow the primitive animal to perform in its own right.

  In civilized society the will to take life is seldom conscious. Most murders are committed by relatives or close friends of the victim and the motivation is subconscious, an expression of rage, jealousy, humiliation, so forth. The need is not to kill but to relieve the psyche of its stress, and to do it in the quickest and surest way available.

  The animal will do it consciously in order to survive.

  There is no name, at Norfolk, for the extended techniques based on classic karate. Most of them are psychological and the most effective is this ability to relax and leave the animal to protect itself: not by defensive tactics but by the most implacable ferocity. In brief it might be termed the invocation of blood-lust.

  There is probably a spin-off involved: the instillation of fear in the adversary. As I reached the two men I was an animal totally committed to killing them and I would believe that my whole body projected a degree of menace that would give them doubts.

  Doubts at the instant of lethal combat can be critical.

  Basically I used the tobi-mae-geri and was in the air with my feet at the knife-edge angle when I crashed into them. The man on the right died immediately and this was to be expected because I am right-handed and since if wasn’t possible to aim a specific blow at both of them I aimed it at this one and he had no chance. The most effective weapon I had for the other man was my left knee, the leg doubled, because it isn’t possible to perform the tobi-mae-geri with both feet: the body has left the ground and the balance has to be maintained.

  I don’t think the knee connected. But the momentum was there and the animal had killed only one of its adversaries and its life was still in jeopardy and it wanted to go on killing and I felt my left foot strike into softness before I landed and there was a clatter of metal and someone moaning as I spun and bounced, hitting the ground and getting up and going headlong out of the alley, the organism still performing at peak effectiveness and thinking for itself as I dragged my collar up and my tie off, sliding across the pavement to where the winos were huddled in the bleak light of the lamp, one shoe coming off and then the other as I dropped across the gutter where the empty bottle was lying.

  The thing had been done half consciously and without rehearsal, but habit and experience came into play and issued some of the instructions during the six or seven seconds available before the other two men came from the alley in a headlong run. In a situation where there is no time to hide, the routine action is to change the image and make the new one conspicuous.

  I raised the bottle again, shutting my eyes.

  He went on standing there.

  He was sweeping the whole street visually, checking the doorways and every other site for cover. I thought I heard the other man calling something from the opposite pavement. He didn’t answer.

  A vehicle went past, heavy, a truck or a bus. Its lights brightened against my closed eyelids, then faded.

  ‘Gimme that goddamn juice, you -‘

  ‘Christ sake shut your mouth,’ I said, ‘you son of a bitch.’

  I rolled over and tried to keep control of the situation, wanting to know things: where were my shoes, how much blood was visible, so forth. My shoes were in the gutter and I was lying on them, concealing them; there was very little blood visible but as I rolled over I let my sleeve cover it because it was fresh in colour and they would expect me to have been grazed when they’d seen me crash on to the ground.

  Through my half-closed eyes I watched his feet, his shoes, the sharp edge of his heels.

  He could do it without any problem, A crushing strike downwards.

  Executive deceased.

  We’ve all got a rough idea of the way we’d like to go when it gets too hot to hold. For most of us it doesn’t work out like that, although Delacorte managed it last year on the end-phase of the Bulgarian thing when he took his Mercedes through the frontier at Svelingrad into Turkey, straight through the bloody barrier flat out at a hundred and ten miles an hour with the tank on fire where they’d shot him up with a submachine-gun and the stuff still coming at him from the guard post-finished up like a sieve ‘but his director in the field was there at the rendezvous and got ‘him out and found the stuff on him: military installation layouts, airfield preparedness schedules, Moscow directives and fifteen long-run tapes of the Sovinformburo breakdown of the tactical manoeuvres operation, the whole beautiful bonanza right in London’s lap.

  That’s the way we’d like to go, when we’ve got to.

  Not lying around with the drunks in the-gutter without even a drop left in the stinking rotten bottle. — Steady.

  Waiting for a crushed skull and nothing to show for it, the mission run into the ground because Steady. You’ve got to sweat it out Easy to say.

  But it’s got to be done.

  Think. Shoes out of sight and one sock half off to make it look like a potato heel, dirt on my face and my hair roughed up: was there anything I could do to emphasize the image? Not a lot. Roll over another inch or two and get the light off my face because it hasn’t got the yellow pallor, the drained look of the man lying next to me.

  Roll over and moan a bit, give a moan. You’re a drunk and your head’s full of booze. Work for your living. Work for your life.

  The bottle rolled in the gutter. One of the others woke up and cursed and someone told him to screw himself and he shut up but it was good cover, first-class cover, The man hadn’t moved.

  He was watching the street Two cars went by, one of them with the emergency light flashing and the siren beginning to howl. Then a truck, with its wheels bouncing over the bumps near the intersection.

  Now the man moved.

  I watched his feet.

  He was going back to the alley.

  Someone was talking and now I could hear a sudden sharpness come into his tone.

  ‘Hey, Harry. Chuck’s had it.’

  The man’s feet disappeared into the alley and I rolled over and got up and staggered along the pavement, passing the doorways and keeping close in case I needed them, my shoes in my hand because when you break cover you leave nothing behind you.

  Except, when it’s unavoidable, a few spots of blood in the gutter.

  ‘What happened?’ Ferris asked me.

  ‘I was twenty minutes overdue on the call§ They put a bracket on me.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘He wasn’t listening for bugs this time, Tour.’

  ‘What about your face?’

  He meant could anyone recognize me again.

  ‘It was half dark.’

  ‘Did the objective see you?’

  ‘No.’ The objective was Zade.

  He was getting his priorities right: there was still a chance to lock me on and he wanted to know how difficult it was going to be.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘West 69th Street. A pay phone.’

  In a couple of seconds he said: The objective’s on the move.’

  ‘Oh Christ, when did-‘

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Listen, I can’t-‘

  ‘Shut up.’

  So I did that but it wasn’t easy because I’d just blown the tag and it shouldn’t have happened and I was beginning to think I couldn’t handle this one and that brought the sweat out more than anything else.

  Be positive.

  I’d let them throw a wall in my face in Cambodia and now I’dBe positive and remember that a mission can be difficult.

  ‘All right,’ Ferris said, ‘have you still got your transport?.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t go back into the area.’

  ‘What kind of trouble was there?’ he asked rather quickly.

  ‘I’ve bloody well told you - they put a bracket on me and -‘

  ‘Information. Just information.’

  Ferris is good at pulling you up when he knows you need it.

  ‘It was just a case of getting out,’ I said, and rested my head against the acoustic panel. ‘So I got out’

  ‘I see.’

  He knew I’d give him more if mere was anything more to give but he didn’t want a running commentary because one get-out action is like the next and there’s nothing to talk about afterwards.

  Some of the bruises were starting to throb and my shoulder felt wrenched, try telling him that, ‘I had to terminate,’ I said.

  ‘Oh did you? How many?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘D’you need smoke out?1 ‘No.’

  ‘What’s your condition?’

  ‘Stunning-how’s yours?1 Meant I was operational and that’s all he wanted to know.

  ‘Very well. Get to the Hertz office on West 71st Street and I’ll have some transport lined up. The objective is at a diner in Queens and we’ve still got one man on him. Give it another go and this time see if you can take him over. Questions?’

  I needed a clean-up but there wasn’t time. I needed some new clothes but there’d be no stores open yet Maps, cash, cover were still intact, ‘No,’ I said.

  He gave me the Hertz address and where to find the diner.

  ‘You’ll need to be quick,’ he said and hung up.

  He was taking a newspaper from me box outside the Varig Airlines -section of the checkin area. The first coin apparently didn’t work because he hit the box with the flat of his hand and tried again. Nothing happened so he put another coin in and this time it was all right and he pulled the paper out and let the glass lid slam back.

  Five ten, lean, thick black hair, long arms, feet splayed a little as he stood by the box. Leather jacket zipped halfway up to polo neck sweater. Panda sunglasses, thick gold chain around the neck, two heavy gold rings. Bronzed, general attitude relaxed.

  Satynovich Zade.

  I watched him from inside the Hertz Cougar at a distance of fifty yards. He couldn’t see me even if he were looking for surveillance in this area because the sun was 09:16 hours high in the south-east and the reflection off the windscreen would blind him to anything behind it.

  I listened to the engine cooling. It had been a fairly exacting run from the diner in Queens to Kennedy Airport because I’d had to assume three elements: Zade, the Bureau tag and fee Kobra protection cell. I couldn’t just fall in behind the leader because until we were within three miles of the airport we hadn’t followed any of the main routes to the downtown areas and I didn’t know if the Kobra cell was in front of me, behind me or both. The only suspect had been a Corvette with two men inside but they’d peeled off and stayed out of sight and didn’t come up in the mirror. The only thing to do was put the Cougar through a series of doubling-back patterns whenever I could skin through on the amber and that had called for a lot of acceleration bursts and close control of the brakes and the whole car smelt of a hard run as I sat here watching the objective.

  The Bureau tag had been using a dark blue Pinto and it had gone now. I’d seen him get out and go across to one of the phones and talk to Ferris for thirty seconds; then he’d got back into the Pinto and driven away. The objective was now solely in my hands.

  Ferris had told me he’d still got one man in the running and he hadn’t told me what had happened to the other one and I didn’t want to think about it now. Later I’d have to.

  Zade moved, opening the paper and glancing at it and folding it as he went into the airport building. I was out of the Cougar at the same time.

  This was a hellishly sensitive phase and I tried not to think about that either because at this moment I could be moving through an opposition surveillance zone and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I believed Zade had got here from Queens without a protection cell because I hadn’t seen any evidence of one and I could be wrong.

  There were two reasons why I didn’t want to think about the second man who’d been watching Zade at the Lulu Belle Hotel: Ferris wouldn’t have simply called him off, and that meant he’d either been got at by Kobra or Ferris had been ordered by London to dispense with him as a disinformation tool and neither eventuality would have been pleasant for him.

  The thing was that I was now locked on to the objective and the field looked clear, and Zade’s destination could be the Kobra rendezvous.

  The checkin area was crowded when I got inside the building. ‘Porter, are you free?’

  ‘Can’t help you right now -„’

  ‘Here’s fifty.’

  ‘Okay, what do I do?’

  That man in the queue at the Varig desk, black hair, leather jacket, dark glasses-‘